Vedrana Ivezić

I am a 4th year PhD student in the Medical Informatics program at UCLA advised by Dr. William Speier and Dr. Corey Arnold from the UCLA BAIR Lab. My primary interests are in building foundation models for medical applications with low data availability and limited signal in the data. My two main projects involve cancer imaging research and wearables, particularly Fitbits.

In cancer imaging I am focused on improving the risk stratification in thyroid cancer patients primarily through the use of cytology images taken from biopsy smears. Due to the sparse diagnostically relevant cells present in cytology images and their gigapixel size, as well as limited data availability, learning robust representations presents a challenge. To address this challenge, I am developing foundational models for cytology images across multiple organs, such as the cervix and breast, to learn robust and generalizable representations that can be used for any cytology dataset from any organ and any institution.

In the wearables domain, I am working on event detection in a private dataset of heart failure patients who have recorded Fitbit data. Given the noise present in wearables and the low sample size developing well performing models is extremely challening. Therefore, I am exploring methods through the use of foundation models to improve the performance of event detection in small Fitbit datasets.

Apart from research, I enjoy spending my time experimenting in the kitchen with baking, hiking, and building fortresses in Minecraft. Please feel free to reach out to me to chat about any of my work or if you are interested in collaborations!